Architects appear with an unlikely frequency in movies given their lowly public profile. Here’s a selection: Tom Selleck in 3 Men And A Baby. Paul Newman in The Towing Inferno. Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal, Liam Neeson in Love Actually, Charles Bronson in the Deathwish films. But ‘architect’ in all of these is not really present as a profession, more as a character trait. It’s a way of instantly imparting to a character a certain kind of gravitas, morality and sometimes, it must be said, hubris.
For example, we can easily imagine that it is architecture’s desire for social reform and its idealism that is channeled into Bronson’s vigilantism – a dark resolution to the failures of the modern project. Or the apparent ability of an architect to believe in a dream that characterises Harrelson while his marriage is pulled apart by an offer of a million dollars from a stranger to sleep with his wife.
It’s not architecture that is dramatised, as it is with, say, a police procedural where the machinations of the job are the plot. Architecture is figured as an adjunct to the action, a signifier of something beyond or behind the screen, a biographic detail.
There are exceptions though. In The Fountainhead the tribulations of the architect as practitioner are the plot device tasked with freighting the movies Randian philosophy in full. The act of architecture – according to The Fountainhead – is heroic and individual and the protagonists struggle is a metaphorical blueprint for its authors worldview.
These though are all fictional architects.
The 1965 film, The Agony And The Ecstasy, however gets closer to a full-on architectural biopic.
Directed by Carol Reed it stars Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II and Harry Andrews as Bramante. The plot revolves around the relationship between the three of them during Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
But before we even get to the plot the film subjects us to an edutainment sequence, an idiots guide to Michelangelo if you like (or rather: A guide to all that old Italian stuff featuring guys with funny names designed to bring the average 1960’s American moviegoing public up to speed). In sonorous tones with Technicolor tracking shots, we are told “The dome of St. Peter’s. A triumph of engineering. A marvel of design. Created during the Italian Renaissance … by a man named Michelangelo. And even today in this time
of scientific miracles… a source of wonder.”
You get the idea. This movie lecture ends with a shot of “The famed Piet of St. Peter’s, now on exhibition at the New York World’s Fair…” as though the crowning glory of Michelangelo’s career was to be part of the googie displays of corporate progress in Flushing Meadow amongst robots, giant sized computers and the Chunky Candy Corporation Pavilion.
Lesson over, the film finally begins. The Pope is returning to Rome after some victory or other. We meet first Bramante who, hearing the chip chip of stone carving, heads into Michelangelo’s studio. Michelangelo is working rather than honouring the pontiff’s orders to celebrate Rome’s triumph.
In this early exchange the movies sets up the dynamic that will be played out between the two. Bramante, officious, petty, snide, smooth and smug. Michelangelo as a wild, driven, individual, unafraid of convention, in constant pursuit of something far more noble than earthly reward. In fact, Charlton Heston is pretty much Howard Roark in a tunic, so close is his character to The Fountainhead’s lead. Which is no real surprise, given Heston’s own self image, the parts he chose to play and his later 5 term presidency of the National Rifle Association.
Michelangelo tells Bramante he is honouring the Pope in his own way through his work on a “tomb will make him famous… forever”. Bramante follows up with a dig at Michelangelo’s professionalism: “Then I fear he’ll achieve no fame in this century. Not at your rate of work.” A classic put down from the seasoned professional to the young aspirant that echoes down the centuries.
But of course, we should always remember that this isn’t really history, but a schlocked-up Hollywood story. All of history is there to talk about how Hollywood in 1965 imagines history. The conflation of the present and the past is even folded into the casting. Take the following life-imitates-art while imitating life interweaving between Charlton Heston and Michelangelo.
Charlton Heston had become a star by playing Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), cast by director Cecil B. DeMille because he thought Heston resembled Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. This is the same sculpture we were told by The Agony And The Ecstasy’s intro-voiceover that was “So lifelike, says the legend that Michelangelo struck its knee with a hammer crying, “And now speak.””
Now, here is Heston – the spitting image of that sculpture – playing the sculptor who sculpted it. In fact, he even goes as far as to dramatise the creation myth of the statue, as though he were imagining himself into existence. As a giant block of marble is delivered to his studio, he tells Bramante, who just see a giant piece of rock:
Michelangelo: Look! Moses!
Bramante: Moses?
Michelangelo: Moses, here in the marble. Moses down from Sinai. God’s anger in his eyes.
Bramante: In the mind of Michelangelo.
Michelangelo: No. Here. Alive. Sleeping inside this stone. God sets them in there. The sculptor only cuts them loose.”
I know you’re supposed to sympathise with Michelangelo. But I have to confess all this macho-mythic portrayal of creativity means I find myself rooting for Bramante as he uses his relationship with the Pope to force Michelangelo into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling against his wishes. Michelangelo is horrified: “But, Holy Father, I’m a sculptor not a painter!”
Bramante, as the Pope himself says is “not only the Pope’s architect … but his advisor and confidant on all the arts ” and its this position that allows him to pull the strings to manoeuvre the Pope into making Michelangelo an offer he cant refuse, a project that will tie him up for years with painting rather than his preferred sculpture, a project that he really doesn’t want to do.
Here’s Michelangelo railing against what he see as the Pope’s stupid brief:
“It’s just that art is not a matter of appropriate design. It’s not mathematics or politics or even beauty. It’s an idea. Inspiration in paint or bronze…or truly… most truly in marble.”
Yet he has no option but to begin work.
“Michelangelo will paint the ceiling! He will paint it or he will hang!”
But things, of course, do not go smoothly. He takes a pick to the stucco, hacking up everything he’s painted so far. He runs away and sleeps in a cave. And its here, in an overblown dream-like sequence, he finally finds the inspiration he needs. Before his eyes, clouds morph into the now familiar shape of Gods finger reaching out. And as they do he says to himself:
“So God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him … male and female. And God said… Let the waters bring forth abundantly… moving creatures that have life … and fowl that may fly above the earth … in the open firmament of heaven.”
So, eventually, he returns to his scaffold perch up in the heights of the chapel. While he’s up there painting away, dripping paint onto the cardinals below, Bramante keeps scheming and the Pope keeps on penny pinching.
Heston’s adolescent portrayal of Michelangelo sadly obscures a fuller range of sparring repartee with Bramante, and the amusing client/architect dialogue between Bramante and the Pope. “Even though Bramante may bankrupt me before he’s finished.” says Julius, wearily, discussing plans for St Peters. Of the Sistine chapel itself the Pope notes “Bramante wants to pull it down and build a new chapel … Bramante’s very fond of pulling things down.” Buried in the film is the possibility of something far more engaging, a Bro-mante bro-mance.
All the while, Harry Andrews Bramante smiles and scrapes, oiling the wheels of his influence, clutching a roll of drawings that are never unfurled, the symbol of his bureaucracy – of course to be read in opposition to the endless physical action of Michelangelo.
To be frank, its an interminable movie. Theres no explosions, car chases or sex. The world it portrays is – on the one hand – vast (the sets must have been enormous). But this vastness is sparsely populated. Just our three protagonists, some walk on Medici’s, a little run out for a young Raphael, a few nuns and soldiers. It’s an empty world, as wooden as the acting it hosts.
The irony of The Agony And The Ecstasy is its simplified deification of the artist-as-hero over the systematic and professional architect. Yet, as the movie fails to point out, if we really believe its plot and Bramante had not schemed to force Michelangelo to work on the Sistine Chapel, it would never have happened. Perhaps it he who is really the hero, the figure without whom Michelangelo’s agony would have never produced such transcendent ecstasy. Could it be that Bramante was on his side all along? Was he the one who really believed in the necessary agony – even if it wasn’t his own?
An even bigger irony is that its celebration of the individual genius over the smooth operator occurs at exactly the moment of the smooth operator’s final victory. Mid sixties America is perhaps the tipping point, the moment that architecture becomes entirely subsumed by corporations and bureaucratic professionalism triumphs over the singular artist-architect.
In other words, Heston’s Michelangelo and Andrews’ Bramante are not Renaissance men at all. They are figures of 1960’s America. And the story they act out is as fictional as Charles Bronson’s violent vigilante. And equally as much of a culturally specific fantasy. In the corporate era – optimised by the New York Worlds Fair – within which Michelangelo’s Piet of St. Peter’ found itself so many centuries later – the movie celebrates an idea of creativity that had just been pronounced dead.
First published in San Rocco 11